SPRING VALLEY, IOWA — Citing their polling numbers dropping in the 2016 Republican presidential primary race, former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) and former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) decided to temporarily “join forces” to address what Santorum called at a press conference “a frightening lack of homophobia” in the rhetoric of most of the candidates for the GOP.

“I seem to recall a time,” Huckabee told his own audience at a rally in Iowa over the weekend, “when no Republican would dare ask for the nomination without proudly declaring his opposition to two adults loving each other in a committed, personal relationship. But now, thanks to Obama’s teaming up with the forces of Satan, the Supreme Court has made marriage a constitutional right, and in doing so, we have to ask, what about our rights to oppress people under the banner of the law?”

The two campaigns decided late last week to pool their resources and make up for the shortfall in homophobic rhetoric. Santorum told reporters he has “always admired the tenacity with which Governor Huckabee boldly proclaims the right of Christians to harm other people whose sexual orientation he is irrationally afraid of.” A Catholic, Santorum says he is “regularly disheartened” when other GOP candidates don’t “go after the sinister gay agenda of equal treatment under the law” as harshly as he and Huckabee do so they decided to “put [their] heads together and write the best, most trenchantly stubborn anti-gay rhetoric this country has ever seen.”

Both men acknowledge the late-night brainstorming session allowed them to see a different side of one another. “I realized that night that Mike and I have really a lot in common,” Santorum told reporters, “and I have to be honest here. I’m really reluctant to criticize him now. I feel like our relationship has reached a whole new level, really.” Santorum said that in order to focus as hard as they could on their task at hand, they locked themselves away in a hotel room, just the two of them, and worked on each other’s ideas for hours at a stretch.

“Nothing would make me happier than to have that night mean more than just one night,” Huckabee said adding that he’d be willing to run with Santorum as his partner on the ticket, and he doesn’t care whether he’d be the presidential or vice-presidential nominee. “I would love to be Rick’s mate, absolutely,” the former Fox News host told the press, “and I don’t care if I’m under Santorum or I’m on top of him, either way, something really good will come out of it.”

For his part, Santorum said he’d also consider running with Huckabee on a “strong, Christian nation ticket” and that a Huckabee/Santorum or Santorum/Huckabee ticket “couldn’t possibly lose” because it’d “wield the almighty power of God.” Mr. Santorum said the idea of running on a ticket that is so unabashedly set in Christian morality has him “positively foaming over” with excitement.

“Of course I’d be delighted being a part of that team,” Santorum said as his press conference was ending, “this country has always been about a group of people keeping another group of people down. Subjugation, repression and tyranny of the majority are tried and true hallmarks of American Values. The night I spent alone in a room with Mike Huckabee with nothing but our love of God and of bigotry to guide us is a night I won’t soon forget. It was transformative, and I will always love — excuse me, cherish — Hucky for awakening something I’m not quite familiar with inside of me.”

Huckabee and Santorum currently place in the middle to the bottom of the pack in national polls conducted around the Republican primary candidates.